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THE STATESMAN AND THE MAN. 



A DISCOURSE 



ON OCCASION OF THE DEATH 



OF 



HON. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. 



DELIVERED IN WASHINGTON, FEB. 27, 1848, 



BY JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 

PASTOR OF THE UNITARIAN CHnRCH. 



PUBLISHED BY REQUEST, 



WASHINGTON: 

PRINTED BY J. AND G. S. GIDEON. 

1848. 



DISCOURSE. 



PSALM xxxYii, 37. 

Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright; for the 
end of that man is peace. 

The week that has passed since we were last 
assembled here has been one so marked with signal 
memories and events, that it wonld be impossible 
to leave it without notice. It is seldom that reli- 
gion connects itself so distinctly both with our own 
thought and experience, and with the striking inci- 
dents of our nation's life. It is seldom that the as- 
sociations of a single day, or a single week, have 
in them so much that presses solemnly upon the 
mind, and exalts it with a serious yet composed 
and joyful faith. The season, always greeted with 
the glad and loyal welcome of every patriotic heart, 
as the commemoration of the birth of our country's 
greatest man, has been rendered doubly memorable 
now, by the announcement which has made the na- 
tion's heart return in part from its fever-dream of 
war to the purer hope and glad anticipation of 
peace, and by the quiet and gentle departure from 
life of the most venerable and distinguished of our 
public men. These three, brought together in 



point of time by the good appointment of Provid- 
ence, are closely connected, too, by a chain of 
moral association, which compels us to feel how 
iitly they belong together. 

With devout, subdued, and serious thought, we 
meet to take counsel in the house of God, as may 
be fit, on an occasion like this, of mingled gratitude 
and solemnity. The final seal is set, by the hand 
of God, to the record which bears the name of him 
whose obsequies we have just observed, as the last 
survivor of that company whose counsels gave form 
and strength to the young Republic. Under the. 
auspices and by commission of Washington, the 
young man began, more than half a century ago, 
his career of honorable public service. Within the 
week he has laid that commission down-, and with- 
«jut a spot on his fair fame, leaving no one line re- 
corded which, dying, he could wish to blot, the 
venerable patriot has passed away, and full of 
years and honors has been gathered to his fathers. 
Lovely and pleasant is the memory of their lives^ 
and in death they are not divided. 

I do not come here this day to flatter the dead. 
He needs no feeble words of praise from me. His 
praise is most fitly spoken in the hearts of a mighty 
nation that mourn for him; in the record of 
public and private acts, that shall last as long as 
the history of our land ; in the remembrance of 
every true word he has spoken, and every noble 
deed he has done; in the substantial justice of the 



world's approval, which gathers up each trait of in- 
tegrity, public spirit, high-mindedness, and Chris- 
tian fidelity, to adorn his memory now. Let these 
speak of him, now that he is gone. Let the un- 
bought and wilhng testimony of those who have 
known him best be the memorial of the esteem so 
laboriously and honorably won. This is not the fit 
time or place, either for the recital of the great 
events in which he bore a part, or for passing judg- 
ment upon those qualities and acts which have been 
before the world's great tribunal for more or less of 
almost the whole period of our nation's life. In si- 
lent modesty we would stand before the awful pres- 
ence of the dead. The marble scroll of history 
contains his best and only fitting eulogy. 

Yet it cannot be that the spirit of such a man 
should pass away without the distinct and solemn 
record, for which this is the fit time and place, of 
the great and impressive lessons which his life is 
teaching us. We have followed him, with the 
watchful eye of personal interest and friendship, 
during the last years of his mortal pilgrimage. We 
have seen his venerable form, as he stood among 
us, reverent before God, upright and firm before 
men; and have joined with him as he shared the 
devotions of our Church. We fondly remember 
how, but a few weeks since, (till he felt his duty to be 
to worship in the spot which was his, as it were, by 
prescriptive right,) neither age and feebleness, nor 
storm and darkness, detained him from his accus- 



tomed place on the Lord's day. And now that that 
spot is left vacant, and his long career is closed, we 
call to mind, with fresh interest, the touching cir- 
cumstances of his departure. Like a soldier, he has 
fallen at his post. In the midst of duties active and 
laborious, even to a younger man, in the very mo- 
ment of discharging his high legislative function, 
the hand of death was laid upon him. And as not 
a day of his life, for more than half a century, but 
was given in some way to the service of the Repub- 
lic, so a merciful Providence permitted that on no 
spot but one bearing the name of the Father of his 
Country, and in no other apartment but in the Cap- 
itol of the American people, he should finally yield 
his breath. Blessed is that servant whom his Lord, 
when he cometh, shall find so watching. 

In the solemn memories of the occasion there 
is not room for one sad or gloomy thought. The 
life of a good man is a precious legacy, which he 
leaves to his country and mankind. In the ap- 
pointment of death as the bound and visible termi- 
nation of life, mercifully ordered as it is, how rarely 
is it ordered with such exceeding gentleness — so 
fitted every way to raise our thought above the 
necessarily mournful aspect of its outward presence, 
to that world of eternal reality of which it is but 
the prelude and the veil. How rare it is, that every 
one's spontaneous feeling declares, that just so and 
no otherwise, to the smallest circumstance, was it 
fitting that the good man should be called away> 



While he was here, we cherished and revered his 
presence, as a precious memorial of the past. Now 
that he is gone, and that the irresistible hand of 
God has been laid visibly upon him, as it were, be- 
fore our very eyes, we feel that it was not a de- 
stroying, but only a sanctifying touch. We bow, 
as before the passing shadow of the Almighty ; and, 
filled with a solemn yet grateful faith, we say. The 
Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; blessed be 
the name of the Lord ! 

* JoHxN QuiNCY Adams was born on the eleventh 
of July, 1767, eight years before the commence- 
ment of the American Revolution ; and, while still 
a child, accompanied his father on a diplomatic 
mission to Europe. Returning so thoroughly in- 
structed in the language and learning of other 
nations, that for a long time, as he said, he had to 
translate his thoughts from a foreign tongue before 
uttering them in his own, he passed through the 
customary grades of literary honor in his native 
Commonwealth ; and, attracting the favorable no- 
tice of Washington, was already the Representa- 
tive of the Nation at a foreign Court, before the age 
of twenty-seven. From that time to this, a period 
of fifty-four years, or two-thirds of his extended hfe, 
he passed through almost every grade of public 
honor. Through them all he carried the plain sim- 
plicity of a republican citizen, the stainless honor 
of a patriot, the incorruptible integrity of a Chris- 
tian and a man. Having filled the high station of 



8 

Chief Magistrate of the Union, he returned, after a 
short respite, to pubhc hfe, the watchful and jealous 
Guardian of what he held to be Right and Justice, 
as a Representative of the People. And here 
Death found him — a sentinel never off guard ; a 
servant always ready for his Lord's coming •, a man 
too severely true to desert a single point of duty ; a 
Christian of too clear and lofty faith to be startled 
or dismayed at any thing Life or Death could bring. 
Such, in the fewest words, was the man whose re- 
cent departure we commemorate this day. - 

In looking back upon a public course so long, 
that he is already advanced in years who can re- 
member its beginning, we are forced to feel how 
very imperfect justice, at best, can be done in the 
shght sketch which the present time allows. It 
is not the outward facts, of which history is but too 
j)rofuse, and respecting which men's judgments 
vary, that we would notice now, but the inward 
meaning, the moral and spiritual reality, which lies 
behind, and forms the bond of connexion among 
them all. It is with the personality of the man that 
we have to deal ; and with those secret principles 
of faith, truth, nobleness, justice, love, which the 
moral sense of mankind recognises. Respecting 
these there can be no diversity and no dispute. 

Those who have known Mr. Adams, however 
slightly, must have felt how strongly he was imbued 
with all the moral characteristics of tiie New Eng- 
land Puritanic faith. A solid and impregnable for- 



9 

tress of religious principle was built, grounded on 
the very rock-foundation, the primitive formation 
(so to speak) of his soul, as a defence forever to the 
moral virtues which Christianity loves. Not more 
tenaciously did the Greek soldier cling to his coun- 
try's liberty — not more obstinately did the early 
martyrs of Christianity keep in their heart the truth 
for which they gave their body to torture and 
flame — not more resolutely do men of Science at 
the present day, with unfaltering reliance on truths 
already disclosed, push their researches into regions 
of stupendous vastness and baffling perplexity, than 
did this true New England man hold fast the faith 
he had received. So strong and enduring is the 
influence of the method or the example the Pil- 
grims left. The form of opinion might change. 
Speculations and heresies might invade the intellect 
and find harbor there. Wide experience and ma- 
ture reflection might overthrow the close wall of 
separation which fenced them round, and made them 
ahens from almost all the world. But that indomi- 
table faith survived, none the feebler for its change of 
form. It held fast its own moral characteristics, of 
unshaken independence, of unwavering devotion to 
truth, of untainted loyalty to justice and right. I 
shall not stop to consider now what errors may 
have mingled with the assertion of that faith, 
whether in the Pilgrim founders of the Old Colony, 
or in their perhaps less intrepid sons. Still less is 
it my purpose here to undertake its eulogy or de- 



10 

fence. But such as it was, with its dogged per- 
sistency, with its quickly-kindled devotion to a great 
Idea, with its staunch loyalty on the whole to lib- 
erty and truth, that primitive faith in Christian 
Righteousness still remains. It runs in the blood, 
and shapes the discourse, and in some way con- 
trols the action of the best New England men. 
And of such was he. His slight frame and trem- 
bling hand — it seemed as if a child might turn him. 
But in the cold quiet eye, in the lip and voice, there 
were signs that assured you of a spirit that all the 
terrors of earth could not quail, nor all the ordi- 
nary seductions of earth move the smallest hair. 
Whatever else might pass away, you felt that the 
intrepid determination of his mind, like an Egyptian 
pyramid, would stand the same. As he moved 
among us, the moral of his life was like the wonder- 
ful battle-cry of Napoleon, — " From that pyram.id 
forty centuries are looking down upon you !" 

It was a part of the same obstinate and unyield- 
ing faith, that in all the duties of life, in every sta- 
tion, he maintained an exact, almost military preci- 
sion, even to the smallest details of conduct. Even 
the habits of his domestic life were marked by strict 
and unvarying punctuality. At sunrise and sun- 
set, while at home, he was ready on the watchtower 
of his favorite hill. On Sunday he was never ab- 
sent from his wonted place, and never failed to be 
the preacher's courteous host. Of the innumerable 
persons he must have known in his extended inter- 



11 

course, of the immense correspondence he must 
have carried on, not an individual or a hne seems to 
have been forgotten. Each was duly registered on 
the written tables of the brain, or in its own place 
in the well-ordered file. In its almost mechanic 
precision, his memory reminds one of those miracles 
of man's science and skill, — of the wonderful engine 
which presents, free from any possible error, com- 
plex columns of calculated mathematical tables, 
without stop or limit ; or of the cathedral clock of 
Strasburg, which registers the close of every day, 
and year, and century, and has a wheel waiting to 
introduce a new series of figures, when the second 
millennium of the Christian era has elapsed. The 
amazing extent of his historical research, and accu- 
racy of his knowledge, have become proverbial. 1 
allude to them here, as another illustration of this 
fundamental quality of his mind ; the same tenacity 
and determination being displayed in these, so 
closely associated with, and so distinctly character- 
izing his moral and religious principle. 

It was in strict accordance with this, that his life 
contains one of the strongest admonitions and re- 
bukes, any where recorded, of the indolent habit of 
mind, which makes the great multitude of men, in 
the stress of business, excuse themselves from any 
effort at the improvement of their intellect. Proba- 
bly Mr. Adams never in his life uttered a direct sar- 
casm or rebuke upon the indolence of those whom 
he must constantly have met, and whose thrift- 



12 

less intellectual habits and utter neglect of culture 
he would have so thoroughly condemned and de- 
spised in himself. The only admonition he gave 
was his example. It is hardly necessary to allude 
to the many ways in which he vindicated the power 
of the mind to achieve its triumphs by toil, and suc- 
cessfully placed his name among those eminent in 
" the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties." Hard- 
ly any external difficulty is so great as the constant 
home-pressure of affairs ; and in the face of it he ac- 
complished prodigies of literary attainment, winning 
the reputation of having perhaps the largest range 
of thorough information of all men living. Owing 
to his imperfect knowledge of English, when, at the 
age of eighteen, he returned from the Continent, he 
did not secure the highest honors of the University, 
which he most richly merited ; yet, a few years 
later, he was the brilliant and successful Lecturer, at 
that very University, upon the powers and delicate 
graces of the English tongue. Constantly urged by 
the press of a multiplicity of occupations, which 
might have wholly absorbed another man, he yet 
never discourteously neglected the duties of one in 
the midst of social life ; while, in addition to all the 
rest, he preserved an accomplished scholarship in 
the learned tongues. And, while weighed down by 
the onerous duties of the highest public station, he 
was well known to be a constant student of the 
Scriptures, critically, for two hours of every day. 
The used key is always bright. The never-flagging, 



13 

always faithful and assiduous exercise of his intel- 
lectual power, kept it always in trim and fit for ser- 
vice, to his extreme old age. By a testimony as 
generally bestowed as it was honorably merited and 
received, the unanimous consent of our generation 
has accorded to him the title (which Milton, with 
the privilege of genius, has forever associated with 
the Attic Isocrates) of "the old man eloquent;" — a 
wreath of civic laurel, that to all future time shall 
make memorable our late friend and fellow-citizen, 
side by side with the statesman of ancient Greece. 
But it would be an unworthy commemoration of 
this son of New England, in this Capital of the 
American Nation, not to add the far higher glory 
which his later years achieved. He has chosen to 
be remembered here, not as the President of the 
United States, but as the uncompromising Defender 
of human Liberty and human Right. This too w^as 
part of his stern, inflexible principle. It was no 
boyish enthusiasm with him. That, if it ever exist- 
ed in him with great warmth and force, had been 
subdued, at least to a common observer's eye, by 
the long experience of life. Neither was it the con- 
templative and religious meditation on abstract prin- 
ciples, or sentiments of humanity, philanthropy, and 
the like, which make so many sincerely zealous in 
behalf of a great idea. It being my fortune, near 
six years ago, to form some personal acquaintance 
with the lamented Channing, about the time that I 
first knew Mr. Adams, I was very strongly im- 



14 

pressed with the contrast between the mild, contem- 
plative, placid, hopeful faith of the retired Thinker, 
and the sombre and sorrowful, almost desponding 
view taken by the Statesman, who for half a century 
had constantly mingled in the busy affairs of men. 
In the words of the record made at the time, " He 
has taken the world on its blackest and roughest 
side, and for him there is no sentiment, no enthu- 
siasm, almost no hope; but stern, grand, moral cen- 
sorship." This is but the impression of an hour^ 
by no means a true account of the spirit of the man ; 
yet it sufficiently indicates a trait more apparent 
perhaps to a stranger, than to a famihar friend. His 
devotion to the cause of liberty and right, amount- 
ing sometimes almost to enthusiasm in its earnest- 
ness, had nothing in it of the mystic's dream, or the 
secluded man's unpracticality. It was downright, 
severe, uncompromising principle^ — less fair and 
captivating, perhaps, to the imagination than a sen- 
timental and refined philanthropy, but involving the 
very fibre of the sinewy texture of his mind. 

When, seven years ago, he stood after an interval 
of two and thirty years before the Supreme Judicial 
Tribunal of the United States, to plead " on the be- 
half of thirty-six individuals, the life and liberty of 
every one of whom depended on the decision of the 
Court," he spoke in the name, not of the pleasing 
sentiment of an ideal humanity, but of justice, "the 
constant and perpetual Will to secure to every one 
HIS OWN right." His plea matches what he con- 



15 

siders a false " sympathy" against a real " right." 
He has " avoided a recurrence to those first prin- 
ciples of liberty which might well have been in- 
voked," and entreats "that this Court would not 
decide, but on a due consideration of all the rights, 
both natural and social, of every one of those indi- 
viduals." I have cited these expressions, less for 
the sake of the special instance, — though that was 
a noble illustration of his adherence to the inflexi- 
ble principle of Justice, utterly irrespective of all dis- 
tinctions of race, class, or condition, — than because 
they indicate a very prominent and distinguishing 
feature of his character. With the urbanity of the 
gentleman, the liberality of the scholar and man of 
science, the cordiality of a friend, the charity of a 
Christian, there was combined in him a truly Spar- 
tan firmness of resolve and inflexibility of will. His 
virtues were of the hard antique mould, though 
penetrated and suftused with delicacy of sentiment, 
and the spirit of a genuine Christian love. Let it 
never be omitted, as a fundamental element of his 
character, and a distinguishing feature of his posi- 
tion, that he was (within the legal and constitutional 
limits which he always held sacred) the steady in- 
variable champion of man's liberty and right ; and 
that, in vindicating these, he was often called to dis- 
play as high order of moral courage, as can ever 
find play in the field of civilized pohty. 

A glance upon the positions now asserted and 
illustrated, as to the personal and public character 



f 



16 

of Mr. Adams, will show that they were all branches 
from the same stock — offshoots from the same 
root — that root planted in the very earliest years of 
his life, and with all its fibres and ramifications in- 
terlacing the entire fabric of his intellectual and 
moral being. The germ of it all was the primitive 
puritanic New England faith, — divested in his case 
of many of the theological forms and opinions with 
which, in past ages, it was associated, yet at heart 
the same through all its outward change. With 
him, as it must always be, it was essentially a reli- 
gious faith. Men's dispute about the forms, dog- 
mas, technicalities of theology, is one of names. 
He, like every good man, was more solicitous about 
the thing. It was the alliance of the soul with God ; 
it was the dependence of the spiritual faculty of the 
man on the infinite source of absolute truth, love, 
and right. So religion always is at heart, whatever 
be the bitterness of men's controversy, or the di- 
versity of their creed. 

Mr, Adams was emphatically, and in the best 
sense, a religious man. His religion was one of 
trust, and hope, and principle. Nothing else would 
have made him so true to himself; so faithful in the 
manifold relations of life he sustained; so constant, 
cheerful, and unwavering in his anticipation of a 
future world ; so touchingly composed and resigned 
at the moment his mind was trembling on the verge 
of unconsciousness. His patient, self-collected 
spirit, his moral resolution, his habitual devotion to 



17 

tmth, to goodness, to Almighty God, all marked 
him as a religious man. And surely, in the example 
of a life so long, so consistent, so honorable and 
useful throughout, and in a death so placid, as it 
were sinking away in the sweet unconscious slum- 
ber of a child, there is all a good man can wish for 
encouragement — all a Christian can ask as a con- 
firmation to the faith of his fellow-men. 

And now a few words in conclusion. It is but 
tracing the appropriate moral of the occasion which 
commemorates the hfe and the death of two such 
men, to ask. What is the great want of our Ameri- 
can people, at this day and hour } It is, exam- 
ples like theirs, of Christian Manhood. It is, a 
generation of men like them, unswerving in prin- 
ciple, unfaltering in trial, unbent by idle relaxation, 
unflinching to meet the responsibility which the 
issues of the time are forcing upon them. We can- 
not, especially in view of such a life and death as 
theirs, separate the religion of the Man from the 
religion of the State. It is needed by both alike. 
It is one and the same thing to- both alike. The 
Man cannot dwell in honor, security, and peace, 
without it. The State cannot so much as be kept in 
being— cannot be saved from disaster, wreck, and 
dissolution, by any thing short of it. Politicians 
cannot save the State. Sentimentalists cannot save 
it. Impracticable Theorists cannot save it. Each, 
under Providence, may do some little share; but 
2 



18 

no one is enough, not all together are enough, with- 
out the lofty, earnest, religious spirit which should 
animate the Statesman and the Man. The work is 
to be done in real life, in a nation''s life •, and it can 
only be done by a thoroughly true-hearted man- 
God grant us the gift of more such men ! Such is 
the appeal which comes irresistibly from every earn- 
est mind, echoed back from the moral conscious- 
ness of all who are alive to the peril and the respons- 
ibility of the time. It is not arrogance or bigotry 
that dictates words like these. They are the utter- 
ance of the fervent hope, long deferred, which good 
men cherish, of the true glory and destiny of our 
land. They are the too sorrowful confession, go- 
ing up now from almost every heart, responded to, 
in various tone, of sorrow or rebuke, from almost 
every public press. What does all this sad confes- 
sion mean ? Does it mean that one or another 
business interest of the country will suffer harm ? 
Does it mean that any party or section of our citi- 
zens is in league with foes, and in disguised hos- 
tility to our own land ? Does it mean that one or 
another section or party would draw the sword and 
kindle the torch of civil strife, and would look on, 
cold-blooded, to see the domestic misery of the 
rest ? Is it any such partial, such unnatural form 
of evil that lies at the bottom of the general com- 
plaint and fear ? Oh no ! It is the confession, 
wrung from the conscience of our people, of its own 
moral want — deeply felt, though ill understood. It 



19 

is the confession of our need of Christian Manhood, 
— of a truer nationahty, — of a pubhc character, 
moulded by and resting on the broad, universal ideas 
of truth, of justice, of humanity, of God. That is 
what we want. Not any partial, half-way, super- 
ficial reform in politics or in society will save us ; 
but the creating of a spirit so wide, so deep, so vast, 
so high, that it shall take in every measure of 
healthy, earnest Reform, as its natural and inevi- 
table result. Differences of opinion there will be ; 
but let there be unity of faith at heart. Diversities 
of operations there will be; but it should be the 
same God that worketh all in all. To use the noble 
expression of the Apostle Paul, what we want is 
nothing more nor less than the measure of the stat- 
ure of A PERFECT MAN. 

This is the one fundamental want of our coun- 
try and our age. And how shall this want be met? 
A moralwant is never supplied but from a religious 
source. Religion must be restored to its rightful 
place in the empire of the heart and the hfe. Re- 
ligion must exercise its sway over our people. The 
nationality we want, the only one of any true glory 
or advantage, is a religious nationality. Great 
Christian Ideas he at the foundation of our Com- 
monwealth. Let these be held sincerely, and em- 
bodied in our pubhc faith. A nation, to thrive and 
grow and be strong, must be bound together by 
religious ties, and founded in some way on religious 
ideas. Religion, true or false, has been found in 



20 

every age and in every shape. Among the Pagan 
tribes of Palestine, it was the grim superstition which 
worshipped brazen idols, and made sacrifice of child- 
ren in fire and blood to Moloch, god of War. With 
the Greek, it was the religion of a sectional and 
narrow Patriotism, fierce, jealous, and vindictive; 
or else of Art, speedily enervating and corrupt. 
In Rome, it was the worship of the impersonated 
State, united with boundless lust of conquest. In 
Carthage, it was the worship of a god of Gain. 
Bloody, profitless, and horrible have been the 
superstitions that have usurped Religion's place. 
But the religion of this people must be different 
from any or all of those. Our faith, so far as we 
have a faith, is in a God who is perfect Wisdom and 
perfect Love. The glorious ideas that lie at the 
foundation of our State, the American ideas, de- 
clared in our Declaration, established in our Con- 
stitution, are the Christian ideas of Liberty and Hu- 
man Right. I will not affront your understanding 
by any defence of these. They are your own pro- 
fession, the corner-stone of your political and reli- 
gious fabric. The State will stand or fall with 
them. 

I do not claim, like a sectarian or bigot, that any 
one source or edict must give outward shape to 
our opinions, or our mode of worship. I do not 
say that the Puritan Church, or the New England 
idea, must be at the foundation of our national 
fabric. But, whatever our faith be, it must be a 



21 

faith^ and it must be one including those great 
American ideas. Whatever else it may include or 
exclude, it must comprise those. They are our 
creed. They are the embodiment of our political 
faith, where it harmonizes and coincides with our 
religious faith. Here, at least, these are and should 
be, one and the same. Bound together, uplifted, 
strengthened by faith in God, in Liberty, and 
Right, there is no such thing as failure or de- 
feat for us. Without it, we are what our Re- 
public may perhaps seem to the eyes of the envious 
world, — torn, distracted, anarchical, weak. 

As Christians and as men, let us reflect sometimes 
on the coincidence between our political and our 
rehgious faith. Especially let us consider this mo- 
mentous question: How is such a faith, in any prac- 
tical, vital, efficient form, to take root and grow? 
This can only be from the sincere, earnest, absolute 
devotion to it of us, individually, as men. Think 
by it : speak by it : act by it. The harmony we 
need, in our counsels and in our action, will come 
of itself, so only the faith has a being first. Here, 
again, is our great need of earnest, resolute, Chris- 
tian Manhood, — which can dare to stand alone, — 
which can say, as a noble man said, who took re- 
fuge among us from tyranny abroad : " Sir, 1 can- 
not stay to argue the reasons now, but I have such 
faith in it that I am willing, now, or at any time, to 
lay down my life for it." Why should it be that 
the battle fields of Mexico are displaying instan- 



22 

ces of heroic self-devotion to wounds and death, 
in defence of other men, or in vindication of the 
country's supposed honor, and that the more glo- 
rious triumphs of peace and Christian pohty should 
not have power also to call out the same unwavering 
and self-sacrificing devotion to Justice, Humanity, 
and Truth? 

For every example of integrity, of moral fidelity, 
of religious trust, let us thank God, and take cour- 
age. Our chief cause of gratitude to Him this day 
is, that he has so long permitted a Man to dwell 
among us. Another cause of thankfulness, in the 
memory of the week that has removed him from 
us, is, that a century and more ago He raised up 
another Man, on the shore of this broad river, to 
be the herald and the champion of our country's 
emancipation. For these two Men let us render 
to-day our devout acknowledgment. Mark the 
perfect man, and behold the upright ; for the end 
of that man is peace. 

How honorable is the willing and spontaneous 
testimony which has just gone up from the heart 
of this people, as it did near half a century ago, to 
the reality and the power of such public virtue. 
"Thank God," (is the warm and honest expression 
of one of our public papers a day or two since,) 
"Thank God, we are not all stocks and stones." 
No; we are living men, with hearts formed to love and 
revere the right — men who must honor true noble- 
ness in every form — men who cannot help but pay 



23 

homage to the high and resolute spirit of a Chris- 
tian Statesman. The virtue of such a man is not a 
name, or an empty dream, but a recorded fact. 
" The end of that man is peace !" Peace to the 
memory of the illustrious dead! Peace, the new- 
born hope of which was the old man's last saluta- 
tion upon earth! Peace, the joy of the nations, 
the prayer of humanity, the benediction of angels, the 
promise of God, the herald of Christ's kingdom 
among men ! Happy the man whose last conscious 
thought was occupied with the country's return 
to peace and amity — whose last broken words told 
the serene composure of his soul! Blessed are 
the dead that die in the Lord. Yea, saith the 
Spirit, that they may rest from their labors, and 
their works do follow them ! 



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